Looking for a laptop For my girlfriend and I don't know which is the best to choose

[pfolsgrofb]

So like the title says, My girlfriend broke her old laptop so I took her ssd that I recently put in to it, out and put it into mine, along with her memory, doubling what my old laptop had and gave it to her. The problem is, this laptop is pretty old, so its a little slow, and she doesn't like how its kind of large and heavy. She wants a smaller one to take to school. But with my experience with buying a notebook, it didn't' end up so well. I still have it, Aspire ONE which is maybe 5 years old now, and The damn thing is slower than molasses. So I want her to buy a nice one and I don't want her to make the wrong choice like I did. She wants one with a screen id say anywhere between 11-13 inch. I also noticed nowadays, since I haven't been bothered with laptops since I built my beautiful desktop a year ago, that these new notebooks are only coming with 16-64 gb of storage.... ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I have 1.5 TB in my desktop, 500gb of that being ssd. I couldn't imagine having less? I guess you could run everything on a flash drive but that seems pointless to me.

Any ways, If someone can help shed some light on this and help me find her a nice, fast, laptop for her schooling. That is relatively small so she can cart it to work and school with ease. That would be great!

Thanks!

 

[Eximo]

What kind of budget are we talking? Speedy small ultrabooks usually start around 1000.

You clearly don't mind installing parts in a laptop, so if you want more storage, select one with an M.2 slot drive and replace the SSD with a larger one. Or find one which still has a 2.5" drive and replace that with an SSD.

 

[Eximo]

Ooh, 7th gen:

http/www.logicbuy.com/deals/dell-inspiron/23041.aspx

Has a 1TB drive, so that could be replaced with a 480-512GB 'budget' SATA SSD and get a better battery life out of it. Then I would go and get a cheap 2.5" USB enclosure, and turn that into the laptop's external backup.

 

[pfolsgrofb]

(I hate mobile... I always accidentally choose best answer.)
Thanks for your reply. She doesn't want to spend too much more than $400. And yeah that never occurred to me honestly lol. I could always upgrade the ssd.

 

[Eximo]

$400 is the reason you end up with computers that are slow as molasses. Have to spend a little more to get longevity. Something like an i5-xxxxU

Not really much to recommend in that price range aside from older used machines, but they are in about the same boat.

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834331974

 

[pfolsgrofb]

$400 is the reason you end up with computers that are slow as molasses. Have to spend a little more to get longevity. Something like an i5-xxxxU

Not really much to recommend in that price range aside from older used machines, but they are in about the same boat.

http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834331974

Yeah I see. Maybe she can pick up one of those ones from bestbuy that only have the 16 or 64 gb ssds. and I'll see if I can upgrade them

 

[Eximo]

Be careful. Low end machines typically have things like memory soldered in. I wouldn't be surprised to see models with flash memory on the motherboard.